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The Senate was designed to be more stable and less subject to public whims. That's why they are only elected every six years, and only a third is up for election every two years.
Also, since senators are elected state wide, they are beholden to more factions, so they have to tow a middle line to please more people. Remember, elections are generally won in the middle. If you lose a vote on the extremity, that voter will stay home or vote for a third party. If you lose a vote in the middle, that voter will vote for the Republican. It takes two votes to overcome that lost vote, so the middle votes count twice. Thus, senators campaign in the middle, and generally reflect the average of their state's voters.
Representatives are generally from districts drawn to fit one party or the other. The Republicans have been in power in the states for a long time, so most districts are drawn to favor Republicans. The Republicans try to isolate the Democrats in their states, so they create a few strong Democratic districts, and they draw the rest to combine Republican majorities with Democratic minorities, to split up Democratic voting blocks. Austin, for instance, is a liberal city surrounded by conservatives, so the Repubs divided Austin's one district into four, combining each district with a surrounding Republican area to destroy the Democratic vote. So, one Democratic Representative is destroyed and four conservatives move in (They actually failed, because one of the districts went Dem, anyway, but that's not really the point).
So, the House is predesigned to go Republican. The fact that it went Democrat shows just how much Bush was hated. Now that the hatred is evening out a bit, many of those districts may go back to the Republicans.
So the issue isn't really who is pleasing their constituency. It's more about who drew the boundaries in the House, and who can please the middle in the Senate.
Sometimes in an individual district--Congressional or statewide--the balance can be such that a far left voting record helps a candidate, or hurts a candidate. I've seen districts made up of extremists from both parties, and very few moderates, usually because of some fluke of nature--say a rural area that borders a liberal city--like around Austin. Then a party can lose that district by angering its edge. But those aren't the main issue with this election.
What we need is to win the state houses, and then we can draw our own districts, and that's when a change really begins to settle in.
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